Yes, that's an interesting article, Slobodan. Its sad that aid to developing nations is often not managed sensibly, does not always reach or help those in most need, and is often syphoned off by corrupt officials for their own purposes.

Aid was once described as a means of transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. Sadly, it's close to the truth.

The opportunity for, and the allure of great profit and wealth is the driving force behind EVERY meaningful advance in technology.

Unquote

The Russians managed to put somebody in space ahead of the Americans without resorting to the profit motive so methinks the word EVERY is misplaced?

BTW do a search for medicines not produced for profit....... such as penicillin.

Ok, stamper....I do indeed stand (somewhat) corrected. I must concede that there are some accidental advances (penicillin) and some that have pure megalomania or political (religious?) power as their driving force. Can you give me 'most' or 'many', since 'every' won't pass muster?

The accidental phrase is actually true because Alexander Fleming left some mould on a window shelf which lead to the discovery of penicillin. There are too many instances of people discovering things without working for profit to research and list. Most of them were decades ago and nowadays venture capitalists fund research as well as companies. The medical companies know how to screw the public to get a return and enrich themselves.

This kind of "private enterprise is better than public funded" is a tired old debate that outlived its usefulness long ago. Yes, competing cell phone manufacturers gave us really cheap tiny phones, blah, blah, isn't that great. So what. It was publicly funded physics graduate students doing boring and mostly forgotten detailed research in the 1920s-1950s that created the field of solid state physics, from which all the electronics revolution stems. Finding examples of some trinket or other or some accomplishment or other to prove one side or the other is as pointless as it is boring.

The accidental phrase is actually true because Alexander Fleming left some mould on a window shelf which lead to the discovery of penicillin. There are too many instances of people discovering things without working for profit to research and list. Most of them were decades ago and nowadays venture capitalists fund research as well as companies. The medical companies know how to screw the public to get a return and enrich themselves.

Yet again, stamper, you're electing to confuse two wholly separate matters. Fleming discovered penicillin by accident. It was developed into a usable antibiotic, and its successors were found or designed, because of a combination of altruism and a desire for profit. Facile vitriol against drug companies which have been responsible for spectacular advances in the treatment of disease is an easy position to adopt but it's meaningless nevertheless.

Denying dying people drugs because they are too expensive should horrify reasonable people. Luckily in Scotland, at least, you get free prescriptions which are available to all. Patents mean the companies can continue to charge what the wish for decades making them rich while people with little or no money suffer. Whose side Kikashi are you on? Do you benefit from free prescriptions or do you pay the full whack and thank them for it?

Yet again, stamper, you're electing to confuse two wholly separate matters. Fleming discovered penicillin by accident. It was developed into a usable antibiotic, and its successors were found or designed, because of a combination of altruism and a desire for profit. Facile vitriol against drug companies which have been responsible for spectacular advances in the treatment of disease is an easy position to adopt but it's meaningless nevertheless.

Jeremy

"drug companies" shall not forget they operate because they have support of the society (in form of protection of their interests, creating an infrastructure that allows them operate, etc)... so some reasonable cooperation is expected on both sides

Denying dying people drugs because they are too expensive should horrify reasonable people. Luckily in Scotland, at least, you get free prescriptions which are available to all. Patents mean the companies can continue to charge what the wish for decades making them rich while people with little or no money suffer. Whose side Kikashi are you on? Do you benefit from free prescriptions or do you pay the full whack and thank them for it?

I don't believe you have any idea how much it costs to develop a drug from scratch (or even from another drug), test it in the laboratory, test it for safety on selected people and then field test it for effectiveness; or that you have any idea how many drugs, after millions of pounds have been spent on them, simply fail to do the job they were designed for at adequate safety. If, as you seem to imagine appropriate, you prevent companies from making profits on those drugs which do get to market, you will have no research, no development and no new drugs. Try to keep in touch with reality: nobody in the UK suffers because any drug which can be shown to be reasonably effective is made available for minimal charge, waived very readily if appropriate.

I am on the side of advanced and well-funded research, to allow new drugs to be developed. What's your bright idea? State funding? No doubt effective state-sponsored research accounts for the deluge of new and effective drugs emerging from China and Russia.

As to prescriptions,I usually write my own: I find it saves my time (and my GP's).

I don't know how much it takes to produce a drug and I am 99% sure you don't either. What is however in the public domain is the profit the companies make and they are usually mind boggling. What large pharmaceutical last went out of business? Any altruism from them it usually to make them look good and take people's minds of their profits. The NHS pays for a lot of the profits and that in the end is taxpayer's money. I hope you are happy to foot the bill?

I don't see any objection to companies making a profit from the production of useful goods and services, as long as they pay a decent minimum wage. If they don't pay a decent minimum wage, then their practices are tantamount to slavery, which we all know is illegal, or certainly should be.

I'm not aware of any economic crisis being caused by minimum wages that are too high. Rather, the causes of all economic crashes, it seems to me, involve irrational behaviour motivated by greed.

In the early 17th century their was the Dutch Tulip economic bubble. The tulip was an exotic flower imported form Turkey and was different from from every other flower known in Europe at the time. It became a status symbol which just happened to coincide with an increase in the general prosperity of the Dutch people, through their increase in trade at that time.

Here's an extract from Wikipedia which describes the total absurdity of that situation.

Quote

The growing popularity of tulips in the early 17th century caught the attention of the entire nation; "the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade". By 1635, a sale of 40 bulbs for 100,000 florins (also known as Dutch guilders) was recorded. By way of comparison, a ton of butter cost around 100 florins, a skilled laborer might earn 150 florins a year, and "eight fat swine" cost 240 florins. (According to the International Institute of Social History, one florin had the purchasing power of €10.28 in 2002.

Likewise, in the build-up to the 1929 stock market crash in America, there was an irrational notion that the stock market could continue to rise indefinitely, allowing people to become rich without working. Brokers began routinely lending money to small investors, and often those borrowed amounts were more than two-thirds of the face value of the stocks they were buying.

This all seems to me to be remarkably similar to our current GFC. People were loaned money to buy houses, commodities and investments of various types, on the irrational assumption that such items would continue to rise in value indefinitely. This is essentially the concept of the 'free lunch', which we all know in reality does not exist. Someone always has pay for it.